Australian Family Cooking 1941 to 2017

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ABOUT

It’s not until you start to think about why you love cooking and entertaining that you realise the influence and importance that the food you’ve been brought up with has had on you. Celebrity chefs often talk about their learning to cook and enjoy food having stemmed from their early years in their family kitchens. This is certainly the case with me.

My Mother wasn’t a trained cook, she was a homemaker who loved her family and wanted to cook for them. The food she prepared came from recipes given to her by her friends, from the newspaper, from magazines, from the back of packets and appliance booklets. The ingredients weren’t expensive, she had been through the depression and WW2 so she was careful with her budget, but the results were tasty and enjoyable.

Every week she would cook one new dish. We were all told we had to try it, we could not like it, but it had to be tried. As a result, I grew up willing to give anything a go and willing to try my hand at cooking any dish.

Mum’s recipe collection was always something I loved, so when she had to move into assisted living at the age of 96, the boxes of recipes were something I was very pleased to take charge of. I’ve created this blog to share those recipes and to add a few of my own, but mainly as a tribute to my Mum and all her years of family cooking.

As I started to post recipes onto the blog I realized that many of the handwritten ones are quite cryptic. The basic ingredients are written down, but the method is either not included or assumes you know what to do. Mum had a great memory and I think that in a lot of cases she came home from tasting a dish and wrote down it’s basics and filled in the gaps when she cooked it – the sign of an experienced cook. As a result I’ve tried to ‘translate’ the recipe to current measurements, ingredients and given some help with the method, I hope that helps to recreate the dishes.